


Like a Penny (or Like Penne alla Vodka)

by lonelywalker



Series: Was Pepé Le Pew Not Available? [2]
Category: Spy (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:40:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21885373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: “No one’s going to get hurt.” “Last time you said that, I got pistol-whipped at a 50 Cent concert.”In which Susan is a lady superspy who can totally take down arms dealers and impress Aldo's family all in one night, and Aldo is an oversexed Labrador.
Relationships: Aldo/Susan Cooper (Spy 2015)
Series: Was Pepé Le Pew Not Available? [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576633
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	Like a Penny (or Like Penne alla Vodka)

Susan has never really believed in the Hollywood airport fantasy. Not the idea that someone would madly dash through security and passport control, somehow avoiding tasers and gunfire, to declare his love for her moments before her plane took off for New York, or Dublin, or the moon. And not the idea that anyone would ever be waiting for her at Arrivals with anything more than a bored expression and a sign saying SUZANNE COWPER. She was never going to have the devoted husband and two cherubic children waiting there with balloons. Who the heck did, unless they all got hired from Central Casting and Hugh Grant was about to pop out from behind a pillar?

She didn’t even expect Aldo. Sure, he’d seemed happy ten hours ago when she’d been trying to pack with one hand and wield her phone with the other, but ten hours was more than enough time for reality to set in. He might like the surprisingly amazing phone sex they’ve been having ever since he had to go back to Italy, but there’s a big difference between phone calls and suddenly having his - girlfriend? partner? CIA counterpart? - landing on his lap with very short notice.

Also Aldo, for all he can drive like a bat out of hell and pilot just about anything, has never struck her as the world’s most reliable man. Plus what does she know about Italian timekeeping?

She’s just exiting the gate and wondering if that’s racist when her feet leave the ground.

“Eyyy! Ciao bella! Welcome to Roma!” Aldo’s grin is as wide as she’s ever seen it, and wow does he have a steel skeleton or something, because no one’s ever swept her up as easily as this - or tried - since she hit puberty. 

Some impulse from long ago wants to knee him in the balls. “God, not now, Aldo.” There are _people_ here, people who probably think they’re filming a really cheesy tourism commercial. But she kisses him instead, both because maybe he’ll let her down and because, Jesus, she has missed kissing him. 

It’s a long, long moment filled with his lips, the brush of his tongue, and whatever cologne he showered in that smells of warmth and coffee and torrid sex all at once. Then he sets her down, still completely oblivious to the people swarming around them, like a human breakwater.

“How was your flight? I was worried I was going to miss you… I had an odiously long meeting I couldn’t cancel.” His language is several degrees more precise than usual.

“Where you were speaking English?” She picks up her bags, or tries to, as he swiftly intervenes and scoops them up in one hand, the other clasping hers. 

“Oh, yes. You can tell, eh? Gave me an ‘eadache. So… where to? You are ‘ungry? We have brunch?”

Sitting back at her desk in Langley, or shivering at some Arctic outpost, she’d have given literally anything to have brunch in Rome with him. Or even without him. So much so that she almost agrees, even knowing she’ll be spending the entire time thinking about something else. But she gives in to what she truly wants: “Do you mind if we just go to your place?”

“Not mind at all. I am your driver. Mi casa es tu casa, as you Americans say.”

In the parking lot, he guides her to a car that… Well, it’s got a prancing horse badge and looks like it cost more than her entire neighborhood. “What happened to the Alfa?”

Aldo gestures carelessly. “Eh, broken suspension.” 

Susan tries to look shocked. Fails. “Is this the kind of car you get on your MI6 salary, because if so I might have to switch teams.”

Aldo stashes away her bags in some tiny space that’s probably designed to accommodate diamonds and champagne. “I don’t have to buy them. Is kind of a company car. You’ll see.”

It’s a smooth, smooth ride. Aldo might not keep to the speed limit or rules of the road, but he doesn’t take them down any stairs or around whiplash-inducing hairpin turns, and mostly watches where he’s going. Mostly. And then they’re in the kind of Fort Knox of gated underground parking lots you’d probably need for your Ferraris and Alfa Romeos. Susan thinks about the scratches on her battered Mitsubishi and decides to focus a bit harder on where she is now. 

“You live here?”

Aldo points up.

Up is on the twelfth floor of an apartment building where the elevators seem to have been constructed by some malevolent space dictatorship: black, silent, eerily efficient, probably plotting to kill her in her sleep. She can only imagine the other residents are hi-tech geniuses and supervillains. Aldo unlocks his unmarked door and ushers her in.

The apartment is almost like something from a magazine: clean, minimalist, like no one’s ever dared to actually eat or sleep there. But there is at least a theme, with the art on the walls uniformly photographs and line drawings of racecars. His coffee table is a giant tire marked PIRELLI. And there’s some kind of sheered-off bodywork mounted on a plinth. 

“You really like cars, huh?”

Aldo tosses her bags on his immaculate white leather couch as the door locks itself with a reassuring clunk. “Is my day job.” He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and leafs through a collection of cards. “I was pilot, now I am consultant for international motorsports association.” The business card he gives her feels richly expensive, embossed with just one of the many names he could reasonably claim. “Good excuse for all my trips to London, Budapest, around Europe… Maybe we will plan a Grand Prix of Washington, eh?”

“This is some kind of patriarchal craziness is what this is. Guess what my cover story is. Guess.”

Aldo eyes her, acutely aware that there are no correct answers. “Supermodel?”

“Dental implant representative. Yep, I sell fake teeth you get screwed into your jaw. They gave me a whole pack of gory full-color photos for the plane, because my support staff hates me.”

Aldo shrugs, finding the silver lining in all horrifying medical instruments. “Is, uh, is still engineering, yes? So we meet at trade fair. We fall in love over screws and screwing.” He puts an arm around her, takes her hand as though they’re dancing. “And we are in Roma, city of romance. You forget about fake teeth for a while.”

She’s pretty sure he describes every single city he’s ever in as the “city of romance” but she can’t very well argue with this one. “Is this even really your apartment?” He’d cleaned up after himself when he was living with her, but this place looks like a pristine showroom. 

“Yes, is really. Come, I show you my dirty underwear.”

“Tempting as that offer is, I’m more interested in something else.” She slips her free hand down to cup the bulge in his tailored pants.

Aldo does his best to seem scandalized. “Susan Cooper. Sometimes I think you only want me for my body.”

“You grabbed my ass two seconds after you met me.”

“Is nice ass, what you expect?” His big hands squeeze it now, pressing her even closer to him. “But now, no fear, I mend my ass-grabbing ways since we met. My hands, my mouth, my penis… Only for you.”

That might just be the most commitment anyone has ever given her. “I don’t know what the Rome Special Victims Unit’s supposed to do now that I took you off the streets.”

“Maybe they save me from hand that promises much and does nothing.”

She does something with him in his too-neat bedroom that compels her to mess things up: his hair, his clothes, his sheets. Phone sex is fine when you’re separated by thousands of miles and have a lover with a voice as velvety as Aldo’s gets when he’s in the mood, but it doesn’t compare to the full, hard, physical fact of him, the scrabble of fingers on skin, the way he kisses her throat and gasps when she moves like _that_... 

Susan has no idea how she’ll ever be able to let him go.

***

“Susan?”

Sunlight is playing through his windows, falling over the buttery, billion-thread-count sheets she’s wrapped in. She might not be asleep, exactly, but she also might never have felt better. It’s the best bed she’s ever slept in, especially because it comes with him, and he comes with warm, smooth hands that stroke over her breasts, down her belly, along the curve of her thighs, every touch leaving her tingling and thinking about the last time he was inside her, and maybe about the next time too…

“Susan? Is not good to sleep so long. You ‘ave jet lag, be up all night.”

She reaches out blindly and tugs his arm around her. “Not now, Aldo.”

“Yes, now Aldo. Also I ‘ave to take you shopping.”

Susan opens one suspicious eye at this unlikely bribe. “Shopping?”

“Unless you brought party clothes. I not mention it before, as you in such a rush, but tomorrow is my mum’s birthday, an’ my, eh, stepfather, he is throwing a party.”

She gives up on sleep. But she’s not giving up on the bed, rolling over onto her back, letting the sheets wind themselves around her lower body. “You want me to meet your family?” The last time she’d met a boy’s family, she was in grade school and they were giving her a ride to the mall.

“Of course. And this is perfect opportunity, no? There will be lots of people. No awkward questions.”

“Why do I feel like you’re not talking about a little intimate family dinner?”

“Yes, is not exactly dinner. More like social event of year.”

As usual with Aldo, she’s struggling to put the pieces together into some kind of coherent whole. And honestly, she knows he does this on purpose. “Aldo, who’s your stepfather? Are you secretly a prince? Because I saw that Hallmark movie.”

He laughs, delighted by this. Maybe more delighted by the opportunity to fondle her breasts some more, her nipples peaking under his touch. “No, I am not prince. Am idiot layabout stepson of very wealthy man. He is good guy, my stepfather. He will like that I am dating… dental implant representative.”

“He thinks you’re an idiot?”

“Oh, I am an idiot, no? I went to elite English university, become elite pilot. And now I fuck around Europe, hurting my head in car wrecks. I am great embarrassment. Good thing I ‘ave baby brother who is first violin in philharmonic.”

Susan digests this. So much for the glamorous cover story, if no one knew what it was actually covering up. “And your mom?”

“I don’t tell her, but, eh, she knows my father. She knows me. She sees news headlines and gets message about her son in the Venice hospital, she puts two and two together.” He chews on his lip, then shakes off the ennui in an instant. “So, shopping?”

Shopping with someone who has a bottomless expense account? Priceless. Shopping with someone whose opinion on literally everything she wears is “magnifico”? Not at all helpful. Even if it’s a wonderful boost to her ego among dozens of svelte, six-foot models. 

Plus, although she hesitates to admit it while Aldo buys her a fabulous outfit that would’ve made the CIA budget department faint, there’s something nagging at her. And it keeps nagging at her while he takes her out to dinner at a charming family restaurant and orders enough penne alla vodka to feed a small nation: the real reason she’s here, which is not to just play house with Aldo and ride his dick at every opportunity. And… the social event of the year.

“This is just like that John Cusack hitman movie,” she says back in his apartment, fishing around in her bag for laptop cables while Aldo stands behind her, arms folded, tapping one foot against the tiled floor with nervous energy. The shopping bags have been left strewn across his couch.

“You are ‘ere to assassinate my mother in the bathtub?”

“What, no, Jesus. Maybe that movie is a lot different than I remembered it. Come _on_.”

It takes way too long to hook everything up, plug in her password and biometrics, and get online. All the while Aldo stands by, refusing to help, as though that will change the facts. Yesterday - or, maybe the day before yesterday, she’s so screwed up with time zones and flight times - Elaine had sent her off to Rome with minimal information about an “evolving situation” that she promised would be crystal clear by the time Susan touched down, all in preparation for an operation the following day at some huge social event.

Well, it’s Rome. It must have a lot of social events.

The files load: documents, photographs, maps. Susan reads through it all, both because she has to know and because she’s not looking forward to the explosion.

“Your mother’s very beautiful,” she says carefully, finally turning the screen towards him.

To his credit, he keeps it together enough to read the files too, and then to walk away from all the expensive equipment before throwing up his hands. “This is unbelievable. _Fucking_ CIA. _Fucking_ allies. They send you here and tell me nothing? This is my family, Susan. My mum. She has nothing to do with any of this bullshit.”

“And she still doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not about her. It’s just a big event, a deal going down. They want the cover of a lot of noise and a lot of people. No one’s going to get hurt.”

“Last time you said that, I got pistol-whipped at a 50 Cent concert.” Aldo sweeps his hair back, fingers digging into exactly where she knows he has yet another scar from walking into a crazy situation without having the full picture. “We call it off. Say my mum is sick or something. They find somewhere else to make the deal.”

“You know why we can’t do that.” She keeps her tone soft, level. During her missions, she’s had to convince a lot more freaked out people to do a lot worse than attend a party. “Right now we have the upper hand. We know where they’re going to be. Cancel the event and we just have arms dealers and their arms in the wind. This isn’t just a bunch of guns, Aldo. It’s something much worse.”

Aldo massages his temples, backs up so his shoulder blades hit the wall. “Susan… I’m very scared.”

The raw honesty of his words gets its claws into her. “Hey… We’re not tied up this time. We have twenty-four hours to plan. We’re going to loop in Nancy and Edgar, and we’ll nail this shit. I can take down arms dealers and impress your family all in one night. Promise.”

He nods, finally. A good soldier. “I believe you… But I’m going to need a drink.”

She shouldn’t have told him. Nancy repeats it like a mantra throughout their briefing and planning, as though it wasn’t obvious from the way Aldo takes a bottle of very non-Italian Scotch out to his balcony and stays there as the sun goes down. He’s MI6, he doesn’t technically have clearance, and he’s personally involved with the event. All an absolute nightmare for an intelligence agency that loves compartmentalization. And if she hadn’t told him, he would’ve had a wonderful night and known nothing, most likely. But...

“All we have is trust,” Susan had said, and refused to comment anymore. Once you started keeping secrets, where did it end? She could deal with Elaine’s reprimands.

The city is dark and sparkling by the time she calls it a night with Nancy and pushes open the sliding balcony door. “Are you drunk?”

Aldo is sitting there on a slatted wooden chair. He taps a finger against the rim of his empty glass. “No… A little. I picked a fucking terrible year to quit smoking.”

“I wouldn’t be kissing you much if you hadn’t.” She sits down on his lap, draping an arm around his neck and leaning into him as his arms wind around her.

“Not much, but some?”

“Can’t expect me to resist all your charms.” Being flirty doesn’t come naturally to her, but it’s a language she slips into easily around Aldo.

Aldo gives her a squeeze and sighs. “You’re being too nice to me. But thank you, I… will feel better in the morning.

“You feel pretty great now.”

“You are just trying to cheer me up.”

She smiles and murmurs in his ear: “I don’t know about cheering you up, but I saw how big that bathtub is you have in there, and boy it’s been a long, sweaty day.”

His smile is lopsided and weary. “I tell you my fantasies and you use them against me. Is some _Zero Dark Thirty_ bullshit.”

“Okay I’m going to tell your mom you compared taking a bath with me to waterboarding.”

“You and my mum are friends now?”

“After tomorrow night we will be. We have so much in common. Falling for bad boy English spies, worrying about an idiot layabout Italian motorsports consultant…”

Aldo tips his forehead against hers. “This is truer than you imagine. I think is best you go to bed. You are tired. I will be there soon.”

She goes without a debate: it’s been a long, long day (or days) for her, complete with jet-lag disorientation and bone-deep weariness that even the adrenaline of the last couple of hours can’t shake off. Aldo’s bed is perfectly neat again, with fresh laundered sheets, like he has ninja cleaners who slink in through the air vents whenever he leaves. It’s with a little mischievous delight that she once more messes up the crisp, orderly lines and folds, and lets the linens mold themselves to the lines of her own body, which have never been crisp or orderly at the best of times.

By the time she falls asleep, Aldo still isn’t there.

***

It takes a while for Susan to realize it’s not a dream. 

So much warmth, like being wrapped in the coziest, snuggliest blankets on a bitterly cold day, feeling safe and good… and then feeling _really_ good as her mind and body intersect once more, beginning to puzzle out what these sensations are and where… Susan’s hand drifts over her nipples and her legs part a little wider…

“It’s _every morning_ ,” she’d complained to Nancy once while trying to crack the code of the office’s new coffee machine settings. “Don’t they have alarm clocks in Italy? It’s like living with an oversexed Labrador.”

Nancy had stood there blinking at her for even longer than was really necessary for Susan to understand that Nancy was standing there blinking at her. “Susan, you’re living the dream. Where are your priorities, girl? The closest I’ve come to getting any recently is when an actual Labrador mistook me for a tree and tried to wee on my leg.”

“...how is that remotely-?”

“You’re like a celeb bitching because they have too many swimming pools. Maybe we’ll take a poll on Slack. See how many people here count ‘my hot Italian boyfriend goes down on me every morning’ as a legitimate problem. Where did you get this guy?”

Susan had poked futilely at the latte button. “You literally assigned him to me.”

“God, why can’t I assign myself some oral? You know what Tim’s boyfriend gave him? Radiation poisoning. But no, your situation’s definitely the ultimate worst. If you don’t like it, just tell him to cut it out.”

If she doesn’t like it… But of course she does. The only thing she doesn’t like is, later, thinking about how desperately, embarrassingly needy she is for him in those moments, when she’s open and exposed and her whole world narrows to his tongue and lips and all that delicious mess of hot breath and slick wetness between them. Sometimes, if she doesn’t reach down and twist her fingers up in his hair, it’s like it’s just some nameless, faceless force of nature filling her with heat and tension. But god she likes feeling him, likes grabbing his head and fucking his tongue with her clit - just a little bit of illusory control before the orgasm takes her and everything is bliss, utter bliss.

They’d had three weeks together before Aldo hadn’t been able to just ignore MI6’s emails and plead a respite for the sake of a concussion and multiple stitches. After he left, her alarm clock was really no substitute. Neither were her fingers and a vibrator, not even when she finally stopped stumbling over what she wanted and they started having phone sex when she was going to bed and he was here, waking up and coming over his fist and these sheets.

But this… Oh she’s missed this: his tongue licking along her slit, opening her up, tracing symbols over her clit that make her thighs twitch and her cunt pulse with an even deeper need.

It’s this, more than anything, that’s convinced her he’s not playing some foolish game, sleeping with her because of some weird spy motive, or simply because he wants to get off and can’t find anyone better. He just really, _really_ loves eating her out. And, god help her, she loves it too. Even if she wants to chart how many consecutive mornings he can keep it up. You know, for science.

“Aldo…” She reaches for him, for his hair and the slight stubble of his cheek, and the chain around his neck. A name she never, ever imagined she’d be gasping in ecstasy, but now even seeing shoe ads conjures up a shameful twinge of pure lust between her thighs. 

His breath stutters against her and she knows - _knows_ \- how hard he is, his hips unconsciously thrusting into the mattress. She’s so close now, the pleasure and pressure building on every breath, and still she wants to hang onto every last second.

She comes hard, hard and deep and so, so warm in a way she could never accomplish on her own. Her body craves him, as she arches up against his mouth, spasming and sensitive and still hungry for his tongue’s attentions.

Moments later, in the afterglow, when she’s trying to remember how to breathe as her fingers pinch and roll her flushed nipples, Aldo pushes back the covers. “Buongiorno. You ‘ave good rest, yes?”

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to recover from that.”

Aldo grins and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Mm, turn over and I’ll give you a nice relaxing fuck. This will cure anything.”

Last night she’d suspected that all he really needed to reset and get his brain back on the right track was a good lay. It might’ve taken longer than she wanted, but she’d been right all the same.

She rolls over, shoving one pillow down under her hips, where she’s already sopping wet, and bunching another under her head. Aldo slides in easily, filling her as her body clutches at his length. “You are magnificent,” he murmurs while he wraps his arms around her, kisses the back of her neck, and starts moving with a gentle, irresistible rhythm.

On the whole she’d prefer he didn’t use adjectives that could equally be applied to a cathedral, but she’ll accept it for now. That and everything else about him.

***

There’s saying the words “social event of the year” and then there’s actually experiencing it up close. Susan has been invited to (okay, mostly covertly infiltrated) more than a few glitzy affairs in the past twelve months, but this is on a whole different scale. If Aldo isn’t secretly a prince, then one of these many, many impeccably groomed guys probably is. Or at least a duke.

“Does Italy have dukes?” she asks Nancy via concealed earpiece, while Aldo is chatting to the head of security next to a huge metal detector. They’d come in without guns, and practically had their phones pried apart.

“I’m not admitting to spending most of last night reading Wikipedia articles on the Italian nobility, but yes. Some of them are pretty hot, if I do say so myself.”

“I’ll pass around your number.”

Aldo’s looking pretty impeccably groomed himself tonight, especially compared to the mess she’d left him in that morning. A shower, a shave, and an unbelievably expensive suit could do that for you. As for her, she felt fantastic and was almost willing to believe Aldo’s “magnifico!” pronouncements. After all, she could just as easily be a baroness or billionaire as any of the other hundreds of people there.

“Ciao,” Aldo says, coming back to her side. “Everything good?”

They’re as prepared as they can be, but he’s still on edge. She gives his hand a squeeze.

“Okay motherfucker, reach for the sky!” 

The American accent is over the top and the words so cliched that Susan doesn’t take it seriously, but Aldo instantly grabs the hand that’s been thrust, gun-style, into the small of his back, twists, and throws his assailant over his hip. The man lands with a muffled cry, both feet slapping into the marble floor. And Aldo, still with a grip on his hand, jerks him up to stop him from writhing around on the ground.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the man says sharply, shoves Aldo's chest with both hands, and then launches into something forceful in Italian Susan can’t understand, but seems to have a lot to do with his suit, and how close it came to getting ripped and dirty. 

Aldo listens to all of this with a smile while dusting him down a bit more violently than is probably necessary, then pulls him into a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. “Ey, we are being rude. Susan, this is Giorgio, my little brother. Giorgio, this is my… Susan.”

“Hi.” She expects some Aldo-esque over-the-top kissing, but Giorgio just shakes her hand warmly. He’s shorter than Aldo by a head and maybe ten years younger, with a baby face and a slightly darker complexion, although they share something around those light brown eyes.

“Susan, a pleasure. How did you meet Albert?” He has the almost-perfect accent of someone who’s spent most of his life traveling overseas. 

Susan glances at Aldo. “At a trade fair... You call him Albert?”

“Only when he’s being a jerk, and that’s always, so it’s easy to remember. Are you one of his spy friends?”

“Spy… friends?” She’s had a lot of practice at remaining poker faced lately.

Giorgio smiles. “No one real goes to those trade fairs. My theory is they’re all just a big cover for crazy international espionage. Guns and cars, and pens that shoot poison darts.”

Aldo mock-affectionately ruffles his hair. “Giorgio is, eh, world’s best violinist.”

“Pfft, not at all,” Giorgio says dismissively, although the corners of his mouth pull upward, secretly pleased with the compliment. “Number four under forty.”

“Is arbitrary number. You are best, I think.”

Giorgio leans in conspiratorially toward Susan. “You see how he pretends he can’t say ‘the’ but he’s totally fine with ‘arbitrary’?”

“The thing is, dear brother,” Aldo says, loudly emphasizing his ‘th’s, “I thought you were on tour.”

“Are you checking up on me? Well I was. Vienna last night. Supposed to be on my way to Prague now, but Dad’s making worlds align as usual, even if I’m going to have to play on four hours’ sleep.”

“Mum will be happy you’re here.”

Giorgio tenses a little, bracing for some kind of invisible impact. “Yeah and I’m going to keep her happy, so don’t start. I’m not ruining her birthday with that news.”

“Is not ruining…” Aldo’s adopted the tone of someone trying to calm a recalcitrant child. “Giorgio, it would be the best birthday present.”

“If you’re so worried about Mum being happy, maybe stay away from the booze tonight, huh, Albert? I’m not the one trying to kill myself on roads all over Europe.and take god knows who else with me.” Giorgio gives Susan a polite smile, grasps her hand again. “Really, a pleasure. Enjoy the party.”

Susan watches him disappear into the throng of people, keenly aware of the vast, vast amount of information she’s missing. “You want to fill me in?”

“Families are… not easy. Come, we will pick up our equipment, then find my mother.”

Their equipment was what they’d stashed earlier that day while they were casing the place, before metal detectors were set up and security started looking a bit more closely at everyone wandering in and out. It was truly amazing where coveralls and a clipboard could get you, especially with Aldo loudly berating her for poor timekeeping in his best and most vulgar Romanesco (so he said).

Susan uncovers their pack again now, from where it’s been ignored in a cleaning closet within the women’s restrooms. An earpiece for Aldo and a tracking device Nancy swears will let her detect the unique kind of explosives that are supposed to be traded today. 

“You didn’t tell me you were good at judo,” she says as they’re half-pretending to make out in a dimly-lit hallway while she passes him the earpiece, the tracking device stashed in her clutch bag. 

“I’m not good at judo. I’m very tall. Almost same thing.” Aldo secures his earpiece, taps it on. “Hello Nancy, how are you this evening?”

“I’m sitting in a basement eating stale chocolate bars from the vending machine, because you two apparently called dibs on all the glamorous assignments. And, oh, does being very tall give you crazy fighting abilities, because I just realized I know kung fu.”

“Oh, excellent.” Aldo always seems baffled for how to navigate Nancy’s sarcasm. “Well, I think it’s about time we found the birthday girl, don’t you?”

When Aldo had first mentioned his mother, the famous opera singer, Susan had immediately imagined a typically maternal, nurturing, larger-than-life woman. The case files had disabused her of that notion in five seconds flat. She’d been thinking of Montserrat Caballé when she should’ve been thinking of a 1970s Bond girl. Aldo’s mom might be turning sixty-five, but she still looks akin to those stylish, sylph-like models haunting Rome’s fashion boutiques. At least it removes any possibility Aldo has the hots for her due to some Freudian fixation.

Susan hangs back while Aldo embraces his mother, wishing her a happy birthday and gently fending off her attempts to check his injured head. “Mamma, this is Susan. Susan, my mother Olivia.”

“Hi, it’s so great to meet you.” Susan has never felt more blandly American than in this moment. She has to fight the urge to curtsy. “Happy birthday!”

“Oh, shush. You kids are making me feel so old. I was such a baby when I had Aldo.” Olivia hugs her, air-kisses both cheeks. She has the air of someone most at home holding court in some unspeakably sophisticated Monaco hotel. Susan tries to imagine her as a young woman with a toddler, cast aside by a dashing Englishman who vanished like the wind.

Olivia leans in close. “You know how much he’s told me about you? It’s like when he was eight and my husband took him around Monza in a Ferrari one summer. You’re still talking about that one, aren’t you, topolino?”

Aldo’s fingers interlace with Susan's as his eyes twinkle with laughter. “I think I might love her even more than a Ferrari, Mamma.”

“Well I hope you’re planning a summer wedding.” Olivia plucks at Susan’s arm. “I have two fine, handsome boys and here I am, still waiting for grandchildren to play with in my old age.”

Susan has so little idea of how to respond to any of that, except to half-crush Aldo’s fingers between her own.

“You’re not old, Mamma. And Susan and I are just getting to know each other. Let’s not plan weddings yet. Did you see Giorgio?”

“Yes, of course. He’s going to play for us later, if he can find his violin.”

“Find it? I thought he went to bed with that thing.”

“You’d know better than me,” Olivia says archly. “He won’t even tell me if he has a girlfriend.”

Aldo looks around, as if Giorgio might suddenly appear. “Well… we’ll go and get some drinks and dance, and we’ll see you later. Give my love to Stefano.”

“Please tell me we’re not actually dancing,” Susan says the moment they’re out of Olivia’s earshot.

“We’re not dancing. Or drinking either. You ‘ave work to do, no? I will say you are on an important phone call about, eh, dental business, and I keep an eye on my mum while you save the world.”

“I don’t think it’s the _world_ -” She breaks off as his lips crush against hers. Susan wants to ask him about everything Olivia had said - and the fact that his long-ago joke about her being the future mother of his children is suddenly rattling around her brain once more - but it’s so much easier to just cup the back of his head, deepening and lengthening the kiss. “More than a Ferrari, huh?”

“More and more.” Aldo glances around. “Watch your back. I am ‘ere if you need me. And when you’re done.”

Susan slips her phone from her clutch and presses it to her ear as she walks away from him, letting the crowd swallow her up.

“Oh, we get to actually fight crime now, or are there some more aunts and uncles he can introduce you to? More weddings we can plan? Suddenly we’re all living in a telenovela.” Nancy is definitely feeling the effects of being up all night.

“You’d love planning a wedding, don’t pretend you wouldn’t.”

“Are you asking me for my hand in marriage, Susan? Because yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I’ll just arrange for that handsy fake Italian to get submerged in a pit of sharks.”

Aldo’s voice cuts in: “I can ‘ear all this. Did no one tell you ‘ow a radio works?”

“Pit. Of. Sharks. Get off the line, MI6.”

The deal - so far as intercepted transmissions can tell them - has been arranged to take place on the far side of the dance floor on the lower level of the complex. Earlier, Susan had scoped out a back stairwell that overlooked that area - which, conveniently enough, was exactly the sort of place a dental implant representative might wander into while trying to get decent reception on her phone.

Keeping her phone to her ear, she heads in that direction, casually adopting a position that will allow her to see whoever is meeting below, without being seen herself or looking like she's staring. That, together with having half of a fictitious conversation involving all the terminology she remembers from her gory infopack, hopefully makes up the perfect disguise.

“That’s Milos,” Nancy helpfully interjects when the man comes into view, although Susan had recognized him already: why oh why did these international criminals think that bleach-blond goatees were the way to stay under the radar? 

His contact is the unknown quantity - the conduit to some amorphous terrorist cell that local intelligence has yet to penetrate. Susan babbles into her phone about zirconium while scanning the dance floor for any likely candidates… But then a service door opens and there’s a big guy in black coveralls and a motorbike helmet passing a package to Milos. Cash, and a lot of it.

“Okay, so where’s the other end of the deal?” Nancy gives voice to Susan’s question. 

Susan slips the detector out from her bag. Nothing. Milos and the other guy are talking, but who knows for how long?

“Milos didn’t bring the explosives in with him?” Susan risks asking.

“Nothing that we saw on cameras. Maybe they’re at a third location. Or they were shipped here somehow… Edgar’s theory is they were routed through some other major capital, like Berlin or Vienna.”

At that, Susan’s pocket chirps anxiously and a hand is laid on her shoulder. 

For want of a better weapon, she comes inches from stabbing Giorgio in the gut with her phone. He hops back, alarmed. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t realize you were…”

Susan taps off her fake phone call, keeping an eye on Milos over Giorgio’s shoulder. “Hi, no problem. What can I… What’s up?” Maybe it really would’ve been better to “accidentally” crush his nuts and leave him crumpled in the corner. Better for her mission, anyway. Not great for family harmony.

“I think I made a bad impression earlier,” Giorgio says, with the air of someone who’s already rehearsed this in his head. “My brother obviously cares a lot about you, and I really care about him too, and I’m worried that… Is your phone ringing?”

Susan tightens her grip on the detector, which is still merrily humming its “I sense a bomb!” melody. “You found your violin,” she says, seeing the black case he’s carrying. Maybe it’s not so important to keep an eye on Milos after all.

“Yeah!” Giorgio smacks the case happily with the flat of his other hand. “So weird. I usually travel with it everywhere, but there was some mixup in Vienna and they sent it straight here. I don’t even know how they knew…”

And now the motorbike guy is coming straight for them.

“Giorgio,” Susan says slowly, “I promise this’ll make sense later, but I’ve just got to-” And she twists his grip off the violin case, throws the case off the side of the stairwell, and hurls herself after it. Which, she reflects, is why it’s always a fantastic decision to wear flats even when your partner could see eye-to-eye with a giraffe. 

“I really should’ve asked if these things are sensitive,” she says, snatching the case up from the dancefloor before people can start kicking it around. Up on the stairs, Giorgio’s eyes are round as saucers, while the motorbike guy is nowhere to be seen. 

“You mean you should’ve asked _five minutes ago_. Good grief Susan, if those things were activated you would’ve leveled the whole building!”

She turns to run. “Tell Aldo-” And there’s the barrel of a gun in her eye line. She swings the case up and to the side before Milos can get a threat out, but while Milos is staggering from the blow to his head, the motorbike guy grabs the case on the downswing and sweeps her leg, sending her knee crashing painfully onto the floor. Of course the random courier is also some kind of MMA expert. They never send the schlubby asthmatic ones who mainly specialize in pub darts.

Susan goes to lunge for him, to tackle his legs and take him down, but Milos is on her, swinging with the butt of his gun - how did he even get that in here? - and it is legitimately amazing what dancing people will ignore happening right next to them. She rolls to one side, searching for a weapon, and hurls the only one she has to hand. Her phone catches Milos square between the eyes and he drops like a power cord’s been pulled, his gun clattering on the floor.

“Huh,” Susan says, amazed that worked, and looks up to find Giorgio standing over her, his hand around the neck of a Smirnoff bottle as if ready to strike.

He awkwardly lowers the bottle and extends a hand to help her up. “Um. I guess you’ve got this covered?”

“Not everything!”

The motorbike guy is back at that service door with the violin case, heading out into the night. But Aldo - thank Nancy - is right behind him. Susan grabs Milos’ gun and follows.

It’s not at all surprising that the motorbike guy comes with an actual motorbike, out in the dimly-lit street behind the events complex, which, two steps away from the height of Roman glamour, looks like the kind of place people get garroted. As Susan hurries out through the doorway, she hears the motor starting, and then sees Aldo run and tackle the guy over his bike, so that the guy lands hard on the pavement and Aldo rolls over him in midair, scrambling on the landing to get the guy in an arm bar, a foot jammed hard against his throat.

“Drop it fucking _now_ or I will break your fucking arm!” Aldo’s had the breath knocked out of him, but his voice is still eerily loud in this deserted street. And he’s not alone.

“Topolino, I don’t think he speaks English.”

Aldo raises his hips, applying a bit more joint-snapping pressure. “He gets the message.”

Olivia taps the end of her pearl-handled revolver against the guy’s helmet as he goes limp. “Well, he certainly does now.”

Susan is about to demand to know how “keeping an eye on Mom” somehow morphed into having his mother as his accomplice in back-alley espionage and assault, but really there are no words for it, except maybe:

“Che cazzo,” Giorgio says by Susan’s side. Of course he’d followed her. Of course. She can sense Nancy cringing from thousands of miles away. So much for dental implants.

Aldo is struggling to his feet in what looks like a not-insignificant amount of pain, swiping stones from his suit and muttering something Susan would swear is, “I am so, so good at judo.”

“What is going on?” Giorgio demands. “What are you doing with my violin?”

“I don’t think it’s your violin.” Aldo retrieves the case from the ground and unclasps it to reveal a padded foam interior, with three metallic globes featuring ominous flashing green lights. 

“Nancy, what the heck are these thermal detonator looking things?”

“Honestly not a hundred percent sure, but it looks like they’ve been activated. They could go off at any second.”

“We can defuse them?” Aldo asks.

“We don’t even know what they _are_ and you want to start messing with them? Say goodbye to your hands, Romeo.”

Susan’s gaze meets Aldo’s over the case. “River?” she suggests.

“River,” he agrees.

“What is happening?” Giorgio pleads while Aldo smashes the window of the nearest car, which is illegally parked and, Susan guesses, belongs to Milos. “Mamma, why do you have a gun?”

Olivia shrugs. “It’s my party, tesoro. Of course I have a gun. Now hush. Let your brother do his job.”

“His _job_?”

Susan reclasps the violin case as Aldo hotwires the car with some device from his keyring, then jams the case onto the gas pedal. The car hurtles down the street, breaks through the wooden barrier by the river, and crashes into the water just moments before an explosion tears through the bodywork, sending a shockwave up the street like thunder.

“Porco dio,” Giorgio says faintly. “Fuck me.”

Susan drags the motorbike guy up by the collar of his jacket. All the fight seems to have gone out of him, together with most of the oxygen. “I need to get this guy to our people. You can deal with the cops?”

Aldo tears his gaze away from the flaming wreck and nods. “Why not? Get going. Giorgio, give me that.”

Giorgio looks dumbly at the bottle of vodka he’s still holding and hands it over. “You’re going to tell them this was all down to… drunk driving?”

“I ‘ad to walk out of Tajikistan in an RAF uniform once. Amazing what people will ignore if you’re falling-down drunk.” Aldo unscrews the lid and waves her away. “Susan, seriously. Go.”

After sternly warning the motorbike guy that she will shoot out both his kneecaps if he tries jumping off the back of the bike, she goes.

***

It takes hours. Hours of processing, of questions, of waiting for multiple intelligence agencies to talk to each other, and then to stop pointing fingers and demanding to know why Susan hadn’t followed the plan and tracked the motorbike guy (whose name turns out to be Angelo) back to his cell. After the first four explanations, she’s pretty sure she knows her answer back to front and, thanks to a harried translator who looks like she’s someone’s kid sister, in Italian as well:

“Did you really want me to let them assault and probably kill Italy’s top violinist, just so I could keep my cover and follow them?”

The answer had apparently been “yes” for a very long time, until someone realized who Giorgio’s father was. Susan still isn’t exactly sure, but the translator had frowned heavily and said, “You know what Ferrari is?” and now she’s pretty certain that Aldo’s stepfather is, if not an actual king, at least the reigning monarch of the Italian automotive industry. Which explains a lot about Aldo’s job, his driving, and his blatant lack of concern for wrecked cars.

When they finally let her go, it’s past midnight and she has to beg a coat from them to avoid hypothermia. This outfit, while glamorous, was not made for the night air. Susan taps on her ear. “Nancy? Are you still there?”

“Am I? Shit, I am. Why am I still here?”

“Well, I’m finished here, and-”

“Oh right, well we’re not finished here. You wouldn’t believe the calls we’ve been getting.”

Susan looks around the utter darkness of the street she’s been let out onto, which betrays absolutely zero hint of the intelligence operation going on just feet away. The motorbike is still there. She turns the key. “You can tell me on the way. Do I have to go bail Aldo out of some jail?”

“Ahaha no. Alas. He’s back at his flat. But his dear old mum’s been booked for… Gosh, I’m not sure what this translates to… Being drunk and dis- No, not disorderly. Oh right, stealing a car, driving it into the river, and blowing it sky high!”

“I’m strongly rethinking the benefits of having this woman as my mother-in-law,” Susan says. “What else?”

“Okay, I know it’s late - so, so late - but Elaine has another mission she told me to run by you…”

Aldo’s building lets her in surprisingly easily. Possibly Aldo had set it up with her biometrics. Possibly the scanner is just straight-up terrified of the glare she gives it. Up on the twelfth floor, the elevator doors open just as Giorgio is stepping out of Aldo’s apartment.

“Oh, hi,” he says, a little guarded, as though Susan might suddenly start trying to stab him with her shoe. “Thanks for, uh, whatever… Honestly I don’t really know what happened? But I didn’t die, so that was good.”

Susan makes a non-committal noise, because who knows what Aldo has told him. “Sorry about your violin.”

Giorgio looks relieved to be on firmer ground. “Oh, my violin’s okay. It’s still in Vienna. My orchestra’s sending someone to pick it up. So… phew, right?”

“And your mom?”

“Oh, she’s having the best birthday ever. What do you say? Drunk as a skunk? And the newspapers love it. Incredible.”

“You don’t mind her being in jail?”

Giorgio waves away the idea. “My dad’ll get her out tonight. He owns half the city.”

“Gotta love some police corruption.”

“It’s how it goes, you know. The paramedics checked out Aldo, by the way. Nothing broken, although you wouldn’t know it to listen to him whine. Are you okay? Those guys were pretty tough.”

Susan tries not to think about how much her knee aches. “I’m pretty tough too.”

“I believe that.” Giorgio steps into the elevator. “Earlier… I was going to tell you to look after yourself around my brother, he’s in so many accidents. But now, maybe I’ll tell you to look after each other.”

Inside the apartment, there’s fresh fruit and wine on the dining table and the disarray of earlier has been neatly ordered and cleaned by unseen hands. Susan takes off the coat she’d taken from the Agency hideout in the bedroom and nudges open the en-suite’s door. 

She hadn’t been joking about the bathtub earlier. That thing is huge. Big enough that Aldo can - as he’s doing now - fully submerge himself in its depths without cracking his toes on the far side. Susan’s busy wondering about the structural integrity of the floor when he comes up for air. 

“Got room in there for one more?”

Aldo tosses his hair back, spraying droplets everywhere, and wipes water from his eyes. “For you, always. Everything is wrapped up, then?”

“Everything is not wrapped up, but no one died, your brother found his violin, your mom’s having the time of her life, and my people have a prisoner to eat alive, so that’s as good as it gets tonight…” She toes off her shoes, which have just about welded themselves to her feet over the course of the evening. “How are you doing?”

Aldo sinks a little lower in the tub, up to his neck. “Oh, I am so, so very good at judo and never getting out of this bath. Nothing broken, everything bruised. Why am I always the one getting hurt on these missions?”

“There’s just so much more of you to hurt. Do you have to stare at me like that?” Getting undressed is one thing when they’re doing it together. Another when he’s drinking in the sight of her like a man dying of thirst.

Aldo shrugs with a splash. “I am not staring. I ‘ave no contact lenses, so is all a blur.”

“You’re a fighter pilot, Aldo. You’re a physical specimen with annoyingly perfect eyesight.” Her knee, when she gets her pants off, is black and blue, but not as bad as it had felt at first. 

“I am retired fighter pilot, but as you say. Also the sight of your beautiful body is the only thing taking away my pain.”

He should write romance novels, she thinks, taking his hand for balance and stepping into the tub. Really, exceptionally dirty romance novels. 

“Careful. It is not only the water that will rise,” Aldo says. And yes, exactly like that.

She settles against him, sitting between his long, long legs, her back to his chest. The water is really, _really_ hot, like the laws of evaporation don’t apply in Italy, but she can’t deny it’s what their bruised bodies need. “Nancy says there’s something brewing in England they want me to handle.”

“You ‘ave fun. Bring me cappuccino on the way back.” His hands go to her full breasts as though drawn there by magnets. 

“They want you to handle it too. It seems our little partnership has impressed them.”

Aldo sounds as suspicious as he can possibly be while rubbing slow circles over her nipples. “Who is ‘they’?”

“Your boss. My boss.”

“An’ they know we are, eh, taking baths together?”

Susan tips her head back against his shoulder and closes her eyes, feeling the tension throughout her body dissolving into pleasure. “I know this’ll shock you, but agents fucking isn’t exactly unheard of. Although apparently agents fucking and then still being alive and talking to each other is a bit unusual. Anyway, what they care about is that the CIA and MI6 are actually on the same page for the first time in years, and I get the idea that whatever’s happening in England now might be related to what happened here tonight. And maybe the Venice thing too.”

“Is all very…” Aldo chews on his lip. “I don’t know if this is a good idea, this… partnership.”

Something twinges in her belly at that, even though he’s clearly still very much in favor of playing with her breasts. She opens one eye. “What do you mean?”

“You are exceptional agent. I am guy who collects head injuries. I think I cramp your style, no?”

“Yeah, maybe a little. But what if I need a pilot? A driver? Someone who’s so, so very good at judo?” Susan pats his thigh underwater with a smile, already looking forward to exploring another country with him by her side. “And I need a cultural liaison in England. Who knows what kind of crazy language they speak there.”

“Issa good point, innit?” Aldo mumbles. “But all of this inevitably, inexorably leads to my father.”

“Why not? I liked meeting your mom. She seemed pretty cool.”

“My mum is pretty cool. My dad is a charming psychopath who views global disaster as a father-son bonding experience.”

“So… more Dalton than Moore, then.”

“Moore was always the truly crazy one, no?” Aldo kisses her temple. “Niente. You ‘ave met the family that matters.”

Susan swirls a finger around in the water. “Aldo… Did you tell your mom we were engaged?”

There’s a momentary pause as he shifts his position, his hands moving lower over her hips. “No… I would not tell her this, but I understand why she thought… I tell her Susan Cooper is woman I want to spend my life with. I did not say anything about what you want. But she likes weddings, she thinks every woman wants to be with ‘er son. So… It is this. I will talk to her.”

“God, Aldo… You can’t keep saying these…” She’s caught between swelling with happiness and crumbling with anxiety. “How can you know something like that? We’ve known each other for five minutes. Mostly while people try to kill us.”

“Is not five minutes… Susan, ‘ere is what I know: I am a ridiculous person in a ridiculous business, and one day I will die a ridiculous death. I ‘ave six names and twelve passports, I speak English with an Italian accent and Italian with an English one. I don’t know who I am or if what I do has ever counted for anything. All I do know is that you ‘ave my back, and I ‘ave yours, and this… This makes my heart feel like it’s going to burst with joy.” He pauses. “Also my erection is almost constant.”

“That ridiculous death might be sooner than you think.” She lets out a breath and curves an exploratory hand around to feel where his dick is, even now, jabbing her hip. “You need some help with that?”

“If only the rest of me wasn’t just as stiff. Is okay. Later. So, you are ‘appy with this partnership idea?”

“The one where we dodge bullets, or the one where your face is in my crotch every morning? Are you still planning to do that when I’m seventy, by the way?”

“Is same thing, I think. And I will be very young sixty-eight, so no problem. You will ‘ave to keep up with your Italian toyboy.”

There’s another issue that’s been lingering on her mind for a while, and the events of tonight have only made it very clear that it won’t simply go away. “And… I don’t know what you’re expecting, but I don’t think I can have children with you, Aldo. For so many reasons.” A year ago she’d been fantasizing about having cute little kids with Fine, had even named them and practically mapped out their genetic profiles. But a whole, whole lot has changed in a year.

“This is, eh, about what I said at the airfield? I make stupid joke. Sorry. Is nothing, really.”

“Your mom seems pretty insistent on having grandkids.”

“She will understand, I think, that it is not realistic to raise children when we are both in this business, and I ‘ave never thought I would be a good father… Fortunately I am great uncle.”

Susan looks at him out of the corner of her eye. Some puzzle pieces from earlier in the evening are beginning to fall into place. “Okay, spill.”

“You did not ‘ear this from me.”

“Course not. I heard it from your cleaning ninjas.”

“Ha - ninjas, I like this. I call them elves. My little ‘elpers, no? So, two years ago, my brother ‘ad a, ‘ow you say, seminal tour around Europe, and now I ‘ave baby niece in London and baby nephew in Paris.”

“That’s seminal all right. Two different women, two different countries?”

Aldo slides a hand down between her legs. “Giorgio is too afraid to say anything to our mother, it gets worse the longer he says nothing, and so I am being a good brother and a terrible son. But a great Uncle Aldo, I think. Babies love cars.”

“Babies have no concept of road safety.” Her legs part as she pushes against his palm. “Are you Uncle Albert in London?”

“I am Uncle Aldo everywhere. No one wants Uncle Albert. But you could be Aunt Susan, if you wanted.”

Aunt Susan. He’s absolutely not the man in her life she would’ve chosen if she’d wanted any kind of semblance of family, stability, normalcy… And yet here it is, all laid out before her, ready-made to slip into between death-defying assignments in every corner of the globe. Something warm and cozy and safe.

“You were supposed to do this tomorrow,” she says. “You know, when I leave all sad and confused because I think you’re desperate for kids and would never really want me? You’re supposed to sprint through security gates while people try to shoot and taze you, reach me a split second before I get on the plane, and propose while everyone claps and cheers… Because in this scenario we’re just so fucking charming no one cares they’re going to miss their connecting flights.”

“We are very cute couple,” Aldo agrees. “So let us pretend we did all that an’ now we are back ‘ere, eh? Is much more convenient all round.” His fingers - those clever, clever fingers - stroke over her clit, making her sigh and reach for the nipples he’s left untouched.

“ _All_ that?” Susan asks, although her voice is little more than a gasp as her hips tilt up, begging for more contact, reaching for a deeper pleasure.

“All that, yes.” A twist of his wrist and he’s filling her, two long fingers curling, pushing inside as his thumb massages circles around her clit. “You want me to propose? I propose. Today, tomorrow, whenever you will have me, I will be there. An’ especially when you need some ‘elp in the bath.”

She wants to tell him _yes_ and _I love you_ and _god, do you have to be so pervy about everything?_ but all those words and thoughts are swallowed up by her climax, like a raging inferno that sucks all the air out of the room. Her mouth finds his for a breathless, desperate kiss, and then she sinks back against him with a sigh, unraveled by pure sensation..

“We go to bed, eh?” Aldo says. 

“No…” She feels utterly drained, the bath is still deliciously warm, and his arms around her are all she needs or wants. Well, his arms and his voice. “Tell me… Tell me about your parents. How they fell in love.”

“Ah, is great romance of course. An’ it begins where all great romances begin, at the Aeroporto di Fiumicino, with a spy on the trail of a master criminal, and a sexy Italian who ‘as a fast car…”

She drifts off on his words and the story of an airport fantasy she’s already lived, and keeps on living.


End file.
